Episode 335: Breaking The Injury cycle
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IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon and Pro Triathlete Sarah Piampiano
Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast!
Our mission is to empower individuals to reach their athletic and full potential. Today, we’ll discuss injuries— a common frustration among endurance athletes—and how to reduce your injury risk as you prepare for the upcoming season during the off-season. While this time can feel like downtime, it’s actually a crucial opportunity to build resilience and prioritize health. Injury prevention is a key factor for success, as avoiding risks leads to the consistency needed for high performance.
What you do in the coming weeks will lower your chances of setbacks without requiring excessive effort; just approach it smartly and pragmatically. IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon outlines four simple strategies to implement.
This episode features the story of Sarah Piampiano, a professional triathlete who overcame a major injury by focusing on sleep, nutrition, stress management, strength training, and tissue resilience. Dixon outlines four key areas for injury prevention: developing healthy habits like sleep and nutrition, incorporating strength training, building tissue resilience through consistent, low-intensity running, and adopting a holistic approach that combines these elements. He stresses the importance of consistency and patience in building a resilient body to prevent future injuries.
If you have any questions about the Purple Patch program, feel free to reach out at info@purplepatchfitness.com.
Sarah Piampiano
Episode Timestamps
00:00-2:27 Episode Introduction
2:27-7:41 Meet and Potatoes–Sarah Piampiano Background
10:05-11:55 Habits: Work with Fuelin, Sleep, Hydration
10:57: How Sarah approached training
15:33-25:58 Habit Development
25:58-31:24 Strength Training
31:24 Tissue Resilience
35:33 Putting it all Together
37:15 Common Pitfalls to Avoid
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Full Transcript
Matt Dixon 00:00
I'm Matt Dixon, and welcome to the purple patch podcast. The mission of purple patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential. Through the lens of athletic potential, you reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time starved people everywhere integrate sport into life.
Matt Dixon 00:29
And welcome back to the purple patch podcast as ever your host Matt Dixon, and today we talk about those things, injuries, the things that unravel so many great plans, frustration of every endurance athlete, and we are tackling the topic so that you can reduce your injury risk in the upcoming season. That's the year ahead, but by taking action now in what for most of us is the off season. Now, as you've learned over the course of quite a few of the last few shows, over the last month or so, off season is often seen as a time of downtime, but the truth is, it is an opportunity. It is where you lay the foundation to build resilience and, of course, stay healthy for the long haul. And we want to dig in and shine the light on this. Today I've gone through the value of off season many times, but I want to really focus on injury prevention, because I think that this is the secret weapon that every successful athlete actually nails down so that they can build the absolutely magic word of high performance, which is consistency. It's all about avoiding risk entirely, because sport already has some inherent risk in it, but it is about smart preparation. And so what you do now over the course of the coming weeks and months is going to lower your risk for setbacks later. And the good thing is, it doesn't require that much effort. You just need to be smart, pragmatic and take the approach. And I've broken it down into four very simple categories, if you do these four things today, and then you have a much better opportunity, and it doesn't always take catastrophe to actually provide the opportunity. But I am going to start off with a little story that maybe is a case in point of some of the things that I'm going to dive into today. I'm going to tell you about professional athlete Sarah piano, that all gets going right now in the meat and potatoes.
Matt Dixon 02:33
Yes, folks, the meat and potatoes and we are diving into injury risk now as ever. Today, we are bringing you this show completely ad free and promotion free as well. I just do want to say, as we get going, that if you do want to continue the conversation at all, if you have any follow up questions around today's topics or training in general, feel free to reach out to us info@purplepatchfitness.com you can also check out all of our offerings at purplepatchfitness.com where we have everything around multi sport training and performance, as well as our brand new leadership program that we've seen and discussed over the course of the last few weeks. So I encourage you to check it out. Feel free. We're always happy to set up a complimentary consultation to help you in any way that we can. But today's topic is injury prevention, and I want to talk about, well, it's a secret, but one of my favorite purple patch athletes that I got to coach, Sarah Piampiano. Now you might have heard of Sarah before. I've talked to her, about her on this show quite a few times, and Sarah actually comes from a really unique background. She came to me as a amateur athlete. She was working on Wall Street. She was 29 years of age. She didn't really have much of a background in triathlon, but she was highly committed, and she'd actually been very successful through the rigors of investment banking and all of the demands that that entails. And she applied the mindset traits that had honed and developed through that journey professionally and took them through into a professional triathlon career, and usually that goes the other way. You've heard me talk on this show so much about how an athlete's mindset is applicable to the business world. Well, Sarah was a really interesting case because she'd honed and developed those traits in the business world and applied them to sport. Very, very rare. She went on to become one of the most successful professional athletes in female American history at the IRONMAN distance, and since has gone on, by the way, in retirement, to build a very successful real estate company, an organization so a tremendous high performer and someone that we can draw a lot of inspiration and Lessons from. But I want to actually talk about an instant that happened with Sarah that was about midway through her professional career. She had progressed over the course of three to four years, first couple of years as an amateur athlete, and then went on for the first couple of years as a professional and done pretty well, but, but she was struck with a major, major injury, and that's what I want to shine the light on, because this devastation, both emotional and obviously physical, devastation that occurred, was really the catalyst that saw her go up to the next performance level by what she did through the process of having this injury. And I think that we can all draw a little bit of insight and lessons onto this. Now we don't need to actually have the injury that occurred with her, and I hope that you don't go through something like this, but we can get ahead of the curve ourselves in this off season to really take the lessons out of this injury cycle.
Matt Dixon 05:34
So what happened with Sarah? Well, we were training very, very hard, or at least I was telling her to train hard, and she was doing it and and Sarah was always an athlete that was highly driven, highly coachable, but, but maybe stepped onto the edges of of under recovery a little bit and without any emotional attachment to it, potentially not fueling enough as maybe her training demands desired. And a couple of weeks before one of her Ironman races, she said that her hip was hurting a little bit. And we went through the process that you would usually do with an elite athlete. And of course, there's a decision to be made here, and that's, should we race or not? Should we take a little bit of a risk? Should we try and go and race this Ironman race to hopefully go and get a win or a podium at least, which has a huge impact on her earning potential, both in prize money as well as sponsors. Or are we more pragmatic? Wait a few months, rebuild and hope the injury is is not significant, and we went through all of the tests. We met with several specialists, and it seemed like it was going to be okay, and she could feel it, but it's always one of these gray decisions. It's not exactly black or white, whether you should or you shouldn't, and I decided to allow Sarah to go and race the Ironman. I had a little bit of a niggling doubt, pardon the pun, a little bit of a niggling doubt that it was smart, but at the same time, we were both really ambitious. She'd really progressed. This was a key race for her, and about 20 miles into the into the run. So she got through the swim. She rode very, very well. She was in the hunt for the victory. I think she was probably not going to win, but was in the hunt for second or third place. Was running through the field, and she felt something go. And that something going was actually her leg breaking. So what we missed, what the X rays didn't show whatsoever, is there was a stress reaction that was turning into a stress fracture right at the hip. And the femur actually and, and that leg, that leg bone, the upper leg bone, broke, and, and, of course, she couldn't finish the race. And that type of injury, a femur break, is really catastrophic. It is at least a 12 month out injury, but truly, before you are racing again, it's probably an arc of about 18 months that you have to think before you have any hope whatsoever of really coming back and being ready to race again. And so when you've got an athlete that has committed three to four years of consistent develop, gone through the amateur ranks, qualified as a professional, done very well, and he's right on the cusp of breaking through to what you would label the world class level. To have that just stripped away is mentally devastating, physiologically, very, very challenging. It's the greatest adversity that you can have. It's very different than just having a calf strain or a hamstring that takes you out of six or eight months. There is very little that the athlete can do. She went through complete repair, complete rest, and then basically had to restart from the ground up. So this was very challenging, but here is where we arrive at the crux of the story, because after the initial grieving that naturally occurs for the athlete, the frustration, the despair knowing that they're going to go on a different journey, athletes and generally people can respond to this type of heavy adversity in many different ways, but Sarah approached it in what I would call a high performance mindset, and it was the perfect way where she said, this is now an opportunity for me to completely rebuild from the ground up and set myself up as I come back as a new athlete, draw from the lessons of how I had been developing over the course of the last four years, and from the ground up, build the athlete that I want to become and and so that really involved several elements. Number one. As habits, she worked with Scott Tindal of Fuelin to really reinvestigate and set a path forward on how she ate on a day to day basis, how she fueled for her workouts, how she fueled for her racing, and how she hydrated and from the ground up, that was a huge project, she also integrated new habits, starting when training was very, very low. It started with movement, because she was repairing from a broken leg all the way up to exercise and then training, and then training at the professional level, she integrated other habits, really smart habits around sleep and hydration, as well as global recovery techniques. So one big category that she just said, I am going to be more professional than I have, is around these big aspects of the habits that we talk about. The second components is she spent a lot of time collectively reflecting on how she approached her training. She made a fresh suite of new commitments to say, okay, when I go back here, perhaps the areas that I was not quite as good as you would potentially hope for, let's really make those gold standard. So going very simple stuff, going really easy on the easy days, integrating blocks of recovery so that we could leverage effectiveness from the very hard work that was prerequisite to actually go and be a world class of athlete, and shift our whole mindset really away from chasing total accumulation of hours or miles to really thinking about effective work, and how can I build the Next year of training with the most effective work possible. So that was a repositioning of her whole mental approach to training. And then the third big category that she really dialed in was everything under the banner of strength. And when I first started coaching Sarah, we had sent her down to the Red Bull Performance Center, and they had assessed her strength, her explosiveness, her balance and core stability, her mobility around all joints, and relative to the thin air of world class competition, she actually ranked very low on all of those. So she wasn't naturally, highly strong, highly explosive, really mobile. And those were all limiters. And so she was determined now that she couldn't chase some bike or run, she was determined to reimagine herself as a global athlete, and doubled down. Got a fantastic strength and conditioning coach and really played a additional focus and emphasis on that part of her journey. So those are the three big categories, and as she came back from repair to movement to exercise to training to finally, training that is required to go and be a world class athlete, that long journey of progression that really took more than a year of development until she should truly race again. She took all of these elements as the anchor points the foundation of her athleticism. She took a very cautious and patient build. Now the truth is that out of this catastrophe that occurred for her emerged a wonderful opportunity, because I don't think Sarah would ever have had the jolt, almost the slap in the face, to shift these behaviors around these big areas with her approach. Because everything was kind of working well, she was improving. And so while everything paused for about a year as she built her way back, that was the catalyst for her to go from a good athlete to a truly world class athlete. And over the course of the next three years, she got faster and faster and faster, and all of her Ironman victories when she had a wonderful dream like performance, where she finished the second fastest Ironman time ever for a US female athlete, and her top 10s at the Hawaii Ironman World Championship all emerged out of this adversity. And the reason that I start with this story in the show today is that I don't want you to break your femur, and we don't have to go through a massive injury cycles to get the slap in the face, but we can draw from the lessons of what occurred with Sarah there, because the way that you can approach the time of the year when you're not training specifically to for the demands of racing, aka offseason, when you have these months that are a little bit lower of physical stress, a little bit less emotional load, this is the opportunity to quote. Do a Sarah Piampiano, reinvent yourself a little bit and go through for me what I've identified four key areas that are golden opportunities for you to set yourself up over the next two to three months so that you are more resilient, more robust and more immune from niggles and injuries that can create so many setbacks. So I want to go through each of these and apply them. Okay, let's first talk about habit development.
Matt Dixon 15:32
This is number one. This is a huge component. Remember, we talked about Sarah, habits, sleep, fueling, etc, etc. It's really, really important. Foundational habits matter. They are the catalyst of your success. And the truth is, when it relates to injury prevention, it doesn't start with some new fancy training technique. It actually starts with the basics, the things that you have to do every day anyway. And so you might as well put some intention behind those things that you do every day anyway. And so let's just simply outline them. It's very simple. Number one, sleep, you are applying a physiological stress to your body when you train, and by putting that stress on the body, you are forcing adaptations. The vast majority of your adaptations occur with sleep. Now you are doing this as a time starved athlete in the midst of a whole bunch of competing demands across all of your life, whether it comes in work, whether it comes with family, whether it comes with travel, that are adding other stresses on top of your life. So you have a stress filled environment, and you're placing a stress on your body that you're chasing positive adaptations to get fitter, stronger, faster, etc, but when your body cannot recover adequately and cannot yield those adaptations, and then there could be a negative adaptation. And that negative adaptation could be accumulated fatigue, could be systemic stress, as I went through, as with my crashing and burning as a professional athlete. Or, of course, it can be injury. Your number one recovery tool that you have to set you up for really positive training, maximal adaptations, and of course, immunity, or at least close to immunity, of injury, risk, is sleep. It is when your body builds strength, repairs itself, fortifies against future stress. So it is your stress processing machine, and when you are under slightly less training load, okay, the off season, this is a great time for you to build habits over the course of the coming months that consistently can get both the duration of your sleep and the quality of your sleep up to snuff. And I want to talk about this a little bit because on my finger I have one of those wearables, an Oura ring. And maybe you capture your sleep data, maybe something in the mattress or a Whoop band or an Apple watch or a Garmin, whatever it might be. And one of the things in the trends that I see with a lot of athletes that loyally follow and track their sleep score every single night, looking at the duration of their sleep, the quality of their sleep, how much deep sleep this they get, how much REM sleep that they have. And perhaps you've had your wearable device that you've been tracking sleep for two years. Let's just make it up. My biggest question is always, okay, what have you changed in your hygiene or your practice or your approach to sleep over the course of the last two years? And the vast majority of people that wear these devices, myself included, look at it every day, but don't make any changes. So where is the value of that, if you consistently are averaging six and a half hours sleep, what changes are you making to prioritize your number one recovery tool, your number one de stressor, your number one bolster of fortification against injury, is sleep. So what are you doing to change that? And maybe because over the course of the coming months, when you have less training training load, it's a chance to develop a new habit around sleep. Whereas, if you go back and you look over the last month and perhaps you've averaged six and a half hours, maybe you can move that up to seven, maybe seven hours and 15 minutes, maybe seven hours and a half. Something along those lines, where you are progressing gradually, where sleep is taking a more dominant part of your everyday life, and it's a really valuable tool. So many people chase magical interventions, but most of the time, simple, happy habit building is the biggest catalyst. And so if you, over the course of the next year, want to break the injury cycle, the first thing around habit development is looking at your sleep and making changes and developing really positive sleep habits, if you're not doing so already. So that's number one. Now, some of the things that you can do there are really, really simple. The primary one, the most important thing, as consistently as you can be, consistent about your sleep schedule. Go to bed at around the same time every night. That is the number one thing that we can do to control and improve our sleep quality. Now, sometimes you might have a holiday party, you might be traveling for work, whatever it might be. But generally, as a rhythm, you want to try and have 25 of your 30 days every month be good sleep quality. And if you can go to bed at a similar time every single night, and then it's potent, you want to get at least seven. But as an athlete, hopefully eight hours plus a night of sleep as well. That means that you need to be in bed for eight and a half plus hours every single night. That's really, really important, and then try and consume your last meal, that you have your last big meal at least two or three hours before bedtime, so that the body can get into that deep sleep and rejuvenation. So these are some of the things that you can do around sleep that are going to actually help you. And if we're thinking about it as breaking the injury cycle, it's there for the taking. It's a wonderful time of the year to start to build this habit in really, really important. Okay, a second big area around habit development is nutrition. This is really important. I'm going to bucket this up in two big areas. Number one, nutrition, number two, hydration. So your nutritional habits fuel your tissue, repair your recovery and your adaptations, and so you want to ensure that you're consuming balanced meals, rich in protein, plenty of healthy fats and a ton of micronutrients, fibers, eight to 10 servings of fruits and vegetables every single day, and that's quite a challenge to do. It generally, the rule of thumb, eating your body weight of protein, it's a good thing to help with tissue repair, and also, don't be scared of carbohydrates. Now, there is a myriad of different eating choices, diets, allergies out there, there's also a blizzard of contradictory information and recommendations. The key thing as an athlete is you don't want to go on a diet. You want to build lasting habits, and you want to do things that are not shackling. You can't be a prisoner of your own eating habits. The team that we use at purple patch is Fuelin. If you want to work with Scott and his team over at Fuelin, they are absolute world experts. They are all about habit development. They're about filtering down into very basic and simple, repeatable patterns, aligning your caloric needs with your training program that you're adhering to, whether it's off season, whether, of course, it's the run up to a key race. They're fantastic team. Highly recommend them. Fueling.com is the website put a backslash and purple patch. Afterwards you're going to get filtered through to the purple patch. Arm of the page, fuelin.com/purplepatch
Matt Dixon 23:16
Of course, there are many other great nutritionists and dietitians out there, I would just really recommend that if you are looking outside of that team at Fuelin that you do really ensure that they understand your approach of all of the stresses that you have in life and your requirements as an athlete, and ensure that you're following a program that is thinking about developing a platform of health, injury resiliency and athletic performance. So you don't want just guidance on daily eating plans for body composition changes. We really want to support your training load with appropriate habit development. So this is really, really key component. And then the third area around habits. Talking about this first category that we talk about here, I would label it as stress management. Physical performance is directly tied to mental well being, and there are a couple of things that you can do to help you actually stabilize improve your cognitive function and ensure that you're getting your body out of the parasympathetic state into a really calm state. And these are really simple things. I think that everybody who is high performing, and the higher up you go in organizations, the more important this is. If you can take a 10 to 15 minute reset in the middle of the day, it's high potency, high value. Reset. If you want to call it a nap, you can, but you don't need to fall asleep for it to be valuable. But in the day, calming down, giving yourself a little 10 to 15 minutes that you lie down, something over the face, to take the light out or in a dark room, it's a potent catalyst of. Growth hormone, repair and productivity in the afternoon, equal to that having some form of and I'll use this in a very loose term, mindfulness. As you're winding down towards bed, you get off of the computer, you get off of the phone. You can watch a little down to TV if you want. As a little bit of downtime, get into bed, read a paper book or a Kindle, something with not too much bright light, start to bring the system down that runway into bed is really, really important habit, and a good time to actually integrate that into your life. So that's the first category that we're really diving down. Is just very simply, habit creation, and it is a key catalyst if you want to really set up for the year ahead, your body being more immune and more fortified against injuries. What about category number two? Well, this is strength training. So in other words, beyond really prioritizing sleep and building really good habits in nutrition you want to build a robust body. Ultimately, strength training is a non negotiable. Now, you've heard me on this show say that I don't like to talk about strength as being the thing of injury prevention, because, as you're finding out right now, people don't get injured because they do or do not do strength, but it is a key tool for not only performance enhancement, so helping you go faster, as well as improving the quality of your life and how you can function in all of your daily life activities, but it is also a catalyst as a tool to help you prevent injury. And so we need to have its own category here to talk about it. A really strong, resilient body is resistant to the demands of endurance sports. It is critical in the off season. But it isn't about just gaining strength or gaining power. It's about bulletproofing the body. That's what we're doing here. And when we think about strength and conditioning, when you start to adhere to any program that you want to, there are several categories that you think about. Number one, human beings are designed to lift heavy things. So you do want to do some progressive overload work against resistance. And this might start with the basics. This might be body weight exercises for some of us, but gradually introduce more weight or resistance, as well as greater complexity of movements, so that you can drive through greater strength gains, and in general, an emphasis around more compound movements, like squats, lunges, dead lifts that mimic the full body demands of your running, cycling and swimming, is going to be very, very helpful. So there is strength. Is one big category. You also want to develop some overall athleticism and get the body really, really robust around all of the stabilizing and supporting muscles. So doing a lot of exercises that integrate stability and challenge with coordination and balance, all of those small muscle groups that support the larger movements. And so there's a whole category under core work, glute activation and strengthening, balanced drills that can enable you to have a really strong foundation that when you do go and run, the body is stabilized more and it's much less likely to get injured because of the overuse the prime drivers and muscle groups. And then finally, the Forgotten child is mobility, so that you can maintain your joint range of motion. This is incredibly important to areas that are prone to tightness, like your hips, for a lot of endurance athletes, as well as folks that spend too much time sitting at the desk and sitting in the car or on airplanes, and your neck and shoulders really important driving from the pecs so your chest muscles to your armpits, as well as all the way around the Neck and the traps in the back and the shoulders. Doing some exercise to keep those joints really mobile and free, like a gate that doesn't get rusty, is going to help you with your movement patterns and ensure that you can stay injury free. There's lots of ways to encompass or incorporate all of these elements in the purple patch strength program, which
Matt Dixon 29:25
is available for non purple patch athletes. I should point out, I don't mean that as as much of a as a promotional aspect, but we have a video based strength program that many non coached purple patch athletes leverage. It's a great time to start that. By the way, you can plug it in two to three sessions a week that you can follow on by video that encompasses all of these components. But you might want to instead go and do yoga, which is okay, but it's missing some of the components. So then you want to include some strength Pilates. It's really, really good for a few components of it. It's missing some of the progressive over. Load. So there are different tools out there. And of course, working with a personal trainer that's wonderful, as long as they understand the overall athleticism and they're not just trying to get you stronger for CrossFit or something like that. But globally, the call to action is, this is the time of the year when you're not chasing core fitness drivers of swim, bike and run that it's a great time to build the habit and the prioritization of strength and conditioning. Now, strength and conditioning has a heightened emphasis for more mature athletes and female athletes, but make no mistake, we all need to do strength. Period. We all need to do strength. This is a wonderful time to commence your journey. Strength is not something that you just do in the off season, just by going through two to three months of strength work now and then forgetting about it is not going to make you more resistant to injury, but starting it now without the shackles of getting ready for swim, bike and run, fitness and driving on the area, is the runway that you need to then incorporate it in your year ahead for your program. So you want to do it now, and that's big category number two. The third component that we're going to talk about is tissue resilience, and this is what I like to call a run project. If you're a runner or a triathlete, then building tissue resilience is a wonderful project to take on when you're not having to do threshold intervals high intensity or accumulate massive mileage. So why does tissue resiliency matter? And it's really your body's ability to absorb the stresses of repeated impact over time and without it, injury risk absolutely skyrockets. So once you've gone through your last race of the season, you have a little bit of downtime and repair. I love athletes to go through what we call a run project, but basically high frequency running that's easier. So during the off season, this is a really good little project for you to take on, and what you want to do is prioritize consistency over intensity. So over the course of the coming months, your speed work are high intensity running. There is speed work in other aspects, if you're a multi sport athletes, or you're a few leverage multi sport to get ready for running. But in the running specifically, most of it is very, very easy, but you want to run very, very frequently. Now that can be different for different people, but I like to build people up to running almost daily. But most of the runs that you're doing are relatively short, low intensity, and can incorporate walk breaks into the program. And really what you're doing here is you're not aiming for a driver of running speed or running fitness. Instead, what the right mental approach to this is think about creating a stimulus that is not enough to impair your running mechanics or create lasting fatigue, but instead just places enough stress to build tissue resilience, in other words, strengthen your muscles, your tendons and ligaments from your hips down through your knees, through your ankles. And you're looking to develop this structural strength for long term durability, and it enables you to very, very patiently, almost like slag an envelope under the door frame to develop endurance and tissue tolerance without over stressing the body. Now these runs, as I mentioned, are shorter. You might sneak one on to the end of a strength session for 10 or 15 or 20 minutes. You might go and do a 30, 40, 50 minute easy run several times a week, and you can focus on form. You can listen to your body. You can keep the effort conversational and gradually over weeks, and more importantly, months, you can just build up the volume of training so the total duration while keeping the intensity low. The goal, in fact, the mission is to not push but to prime the body for higher workloads. Later, I want to repeat that your mission is not to push the body forward, but it's about priming the body so that in the middle of February, as I record this in the middle of October, my body is ready to absorb the harder and more demanding running that I would love to do with a really injury resistant athlete, and that's Hill repetitions, track sessions over distance, demanding runs with tempo, intensity, etc. But you can only do that. If you have developed tissue resilience, and this is it. Now the real power here comes with frequency, and you want to think about it like drip feeding resilience to your muscles, tends and ligaments, preparing them for the more intense demands of training in the coming season. And when you get that, you get it all together. So these are our three big areas, and I promised you four. So here's the fourth, putting it all together a really holistic approach to injury prevention. Let's close it out with this. These areas are all individually valuable, but you can't rely on just one pillar, whether that's your sleep and your other habits, your strength or your running frequency, to get you injury resistant. Instead, it is the combination of these that build up a resilient body capable of handling the demands of your sport. And this is why, by the way, a few weeks ago, I said it's absolute madness if you go rogue and random over the course of off season. Because by focusing on a few habits, sleep, nutrition, etc, you commit to strength training and you build tissue resilience. It is that vortex, that combination, that is the catalyst for you to up level. And so that's what we're looking to do to up level. But a part of it, up level is preventing you from getting injured. And so these actions developing habits, incorporating strength and a structured run project, it is a comprehensive approach to ensure that you don't get injured. And trust me, consistency is key. It's about patience. It's about not overwhelming yourself, and it's also realizing that you're not going to get instant validation on this. Okay, how very un American of me. I'm not going to give you instant results, but I promise you the long term payoffs are enormous. Let me finish with a few pitfalls to avoid. Number one, ensure you don't overdo it. Early, athletes often rush back into high intensity training way too soon, the off season is about methodical progression, patience, especially on the run. Number two, a big Pitfall, neglecting recovery. It's so easy to overlook recovery when you're not in peak training, but you want to lock it in, whether that's your sleep, remember your nutrition or, of course, your mental recovery really key. And finally, don't skip the strength. It is in a natural endurance athlete's DNA to think about strength as a bolt on or as an afterthought. It is your Bullseye over the course of the coming months, it is what you build your endurance activity around, critically important, and so set yourself up for a healthy season. Start doing it, build these habits now. Don't wait till you're deep into the season, because it's not going to happen, then the work you do now is going to be successful. And I challenge you spend the next week self assessing, where can I improve? Am I sleeping enough? Have I got an Oura ring or a Whoop band or a Garmin or an Apple on my wrist? But I haven't actually made any changes. Think about making changes now. Is your nutrition supporting your recovery? If it's not, reach out to us. Info@purplepatchfitness.com We'll help you. We'll send you some resources. We can set you up with the team of Fuelin for a simple consultation. It's very affordable, but it's a really good investment. Have you incorporated strength training yet? Are you doing your easy run project, if you're a triathlete or a runner, if you're not, now's the time to do it. It is about preventing injury for the future habits strength and, of
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course, ensuring that you dial in that tissue Resilience Project, injury prevention isn't something that you think about when you're sidelined. It's built over time. It's an investment, and you can do it. It's time to do it now in the off season. It sets you up for a successful season ahead. Alrighty, I hope that helps Have a good one, folks. We'll be back next week. We're going to dive into a high performance mindset. Next week, we're going to be talking about reflection, a key component. I'm going to do some storytelling as well as ever. You can follow us on the socials, and of course, feel free to connect with me at LinkedIn, and I encourage you to go to our website, purple patch fitness. Check up in the corner there the leadership program. It's live. You can see it. If you're a business leader, it might be something for you, feel free to reach out. We can set up a consultation, take care. Guys, thanks so much for joining and thank you for listening. I hope that you enjoyed the new format. You can never miss an episode by simply subscribing head to the purple patch channel of YouTube, and you will find it there. And you could subscribe. Of course, I'd like to ask you if you will subscribe. Also Share It With Your Friends, and it's really helpful if you leave a nice, positive review in the comments. Now, any questions that you have let me know, feel free to add a comment, and I will try my best to respond and support you on your performance journey. And in fact, as we commence this video podcast experience, if you have any feedback at all, as mentioned earlier in the show, we would love your help in helping us to improve. Simply email us at info@purplepatchfitness.com or leave it in the comments of the show at the purple patch page, and we will get you dialed in. We'd love constructive feedback. We are in a growth mindset, as we like to call it, and so feel free to share with your friends. But as I said, Let's build this together. Let's make it something special. It's really fun. We're really trying hard to make it a special experience, and we want to welcome you into the purple patch community with that. I hope you have a great week. Stay healthy, have fun, keep smiling, Doing whatever you do, take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
injury prevention, off-season training, Sarah Pimpiano, professional athlete, stress fracture, recovery habits, sleep importance, nutrition habits, hydration, strength training, tissue resilience, mental well-being, high performance, consistency, off-season goals